Introducing The Bands Performing At 2016's Haight Ashbury Street Fair

The 39th annual Haight Ashbury Street Fair is less than two weeks away (it's on Sunday, June 12th), and the details are beginning to come together. Park Station officer Lily Prillinger won the fair's poster contest for the second year in a row, and the official posters she designed have been distributed and displayed all around the neighborhood (you can purchase yours at Mendel's).

Last weekend, the fair's annual Battle of the Bands results were announced, and the official lineup has been released. Here, for your listening pleasure, is a little sample of all the music you can catch during this year's festivities.

Berkeley-based Greg Dale has performed in several Bay Area projects, including voicing the (fake) band "Midnight Riders" in the video game Left 4 Dead II. Here's a song from his 2011 solo album, "Songs From the Shallow Waters":

San Francisco-based Waves of Silver was formed in 2013 by Ariel Friedman and James Johnson, and they've got kind of an indie rock/folk/jazz thing going. They performed at the fair last year—here's the video, in case you missed it:

The San Francisco-based Dave Nelson Band is the self-described "original jam band," formed in 1994 and still going strong. Here they are performing in Portland, Oregon last October. (Most of their YouTube videos are around two hours long, because jam band.)

David Freiberg, for the uninitiated, is the co-founder of prominent Bay Area band Quicksilver Messenger Service, formed in the mid-1960s. He would later join Jefferson Airplane, and has connections with all the folks you'd expect (your Joplins, your Garcias, etc.)

Recently, Freiberg becan performing again as Quicksilver Messenger Service, along with original band member Gary Duncan. Here they are performing in Maryland last year:

Jefferson Starship has had a long and storied history as a band, which you can read about here. 2016's iteration sounds a lot like the old Jefferson Starship: psychedelic and electric folk. To get a feel for what they're like now, here they are performing in Miami earlier this year, with the aforementioned David Freiberg.

Masonic Stage Lineup

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Drawing influence from the works of The (early) Cure, Joy Division, Bauhaus, New Order, Echo and the Bunnymen, Interpol et al, they produce a sound that echoes the past, haunts the present and is constantly in the future." Below, In Letter Form's performing "Wait Now."

Bay Area-based Mannequin Planet is a mash-up of art, music, burlesque, fashion, and circus performance. On Facebook, they describe themselves as "B-52's meets Nine Inch Nails," if that helps. Here they are performing at Stork Club in Oakland earlier this year:

Closing out the day is Crystal Garden, the brainchild of the Dave Matthews Band's violinist, Boyd Tinsley. About three years ago, Tinsley scoured the globe for musicians to form a new band, and Crystal Garden was born. Here's a clip of them performing in Virginia: